We are back!
Finally caught up on sleep after the busy LinuxCon EU 2015 schedule. There was so much going on we really needed Hermione’s Time Turner to see all the sessions we wanted. Not to mention the conference hall filled with people and booths at all times. It was awesome to see so many projects and technologies flourishing thanks to Linux.

There was so much to do and see, we are still reviewing all of the notes we took over the event. But here is a summary of our favourites:

Dan – Open Storage in the Enterprise with Gluster and Ceph
“Gluster and Ceph are brilliantly powerful tools for distributing file storage. This talk discussed some of the more obscure ways that these tools can be used. One example used two great tricks to use thin provisioning to intentionally allow customers to over commit on their storage as well as virtualising virtualised storage! A complete abuse of technology but always fun to watch”

Alex – Dockerizing your infrastructure with Machinery – Slides
“This was a talk about openSUSE’s new software called Machinery, it allows you to take a live bare-metal/vps environment and automatically split it up into docker containers. It can detect what services are running on the original machine and create separate instances for the database and webserver and looks in configuration files to determine what packages and libraries each docker image will need. It’s not currently available for Debian but looks like a really useful tool for testing bare metal to container deployments.”

Rob – Manageable application container – Slides
“Manageable application containers was a great session, initially drawn in by this quote from its description ‘an operating system in a single image which, rather than ever being updated, only gets rebuilt when needed’. It covered updating multiple containers at once with minimal downtime. I can’t wait to play with one of the technologies discussed OverlayFS, it’s really cool letting you mount a directory where any changes made are put into a separate location. I keep thinking of more use cases for it.”

Gary – The Art of Counting Potatoes With Linux – Slides
“Showed the process from going from a bare-metal implementation, to a Linux app with proprietary libraries, to a completely open source stack, showcasing the good and bad of each step. Very interesting how something as simple as sorting potatoes can involve such innovative and intelligent technology. And I like potatoes.”

We all cannot wait to play and explore all of the cool technologies we have seen and implement them in our company. If anyone has a project that needs GlusterFS, Docker, OverlayFS, OpenStack or just a very secure server we are your guys!

We all want to say thanks to the Linux Foundation for organising this event.
Keep up the good work, can’t wait to see you at the next one. :)